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Thursday, January 12, 2012

Russia Accuses the U.S. of a Secret Mars Plot

Nothing like a good old cold war in space to get countries off the ground and into space. America has hotels on Mars and a thing or two on Phobos, sure they are secret, not even Americans know about them. So what else is new.

Oh Russia, you used to do paranoia so much better. The Evil Empire got its
name in part because of its nasty post–World War II habit of gathering up
little, nearby countries — countries that didn't strictly want to be gathered up
— in order to build a buffer on its western flank. That was un-neighborly, but
at least understandable. You try living next to Germany for the first half of
the 20th century and see if you don't double-lock the door.

But the Cold War is over, Germany's been housebroken, and there's less need
than ever to see hostile foreigners lurking behind every bush. You wouldn't have
known that this week, however, listening to Vladimir Popovkin, director of
Roscosmos, the Russian space agency.

It's been a bad couple of months for Roscosmos, ever since an ambitious
Russian Mars probe was launched on Nov. 9, headed to the Martian moon Phobos to
collect and return a sample of extraterrestrial rock and soil. The ship, named
Phobos-Grunt (or Ground) fell a wee bit short of its target, never making
it out of Earth's orbit after an upper stage booster failed. Now, as all things
stranded in low Earth orbit must, the probe is headed home, set to re-enter the
atmosphere and break apart sometime between Jan. 14 and 16. The best estimate so
far is that the precise moment of impact will be 1:18 p.m., Moscow time, on Jan.
15, and the precise place will be the Indian Ocean. (See "Can Russia Fix Its Crippled Mars Probe in
Time?")

In announcing this news on Tuesday, however, Popovkin couldn't resist
deflecting the blame for the mission's failure, suggesting — with an exquisite
lack of subtlety — that the mission may have been sabotaged by another country
(America, we're looking at you) using an antisatellite weapon. "We don't want to
accuse anybody," Popovkin said, accusing somebody, "but there are very powerful
devices that can influence spacecraft now." In case you were wondering, that's
Russian for "I'm just sayin'."

O.K., so what exactly is Popovkin's claim? It's true that when Russian
spacecraft fail very early in their missions — just as they're getting their
footing in orbit — the problems often occur when craft are flying over the
western hemisphere, where any imagined skeet-shooting from the U.S. could take
place. "The frequent failure of our space launches," he told the newspaper
Izvestia, "which occur at a time when they are flying over the part of
the Earth not visible from Russia, where we do not see the spacecraft and do not
receive telemetric information, are not clear to us."

Maybe, but they should be. It's a basic rule of orbital mechanics that if you
want to adjust your flight path when you're on one side of the planet, you have
to begin the maneuver while you're still on the other side. Accelerate when
you're over the western hemisphere and your altitude will increase by the time
you're over the eastern. Decelerate and you'll be flying lower half a revolution
later. By definition, Russia's key early maneuvers in any flight must thus take
place while they're flying through our orbital neighborhood — just as ours take
place while we're flying through theirs.

None of that means we're responsible for the breakdowns — or that we'd even
have the technical capability for such meddling. That didn't stop another
Russian official, Nikolai Rodinov, who once oversaw the country's strategic
early warning system, from suggesting that powerful electromagnetic impulses — a
nicely vague but just-plausible-enough weapon — were to blame. (See TIME's photo-essay "Russia Launches a Manned Rocket in a
Snowstorm.")

It's worth noting that the U.S. would have nothing to gain and a whole lot to
lose by monkeying around with a Russian Mars probe — especially since we're now
dependent on Roscosmos rockets to ferry us to the NASA-built International Space
Station. Offend our designated driver and we could be left without a lift. It's
worth noting, too, that Roscosmos hardly needs us to help them not get to
Mars. Since 1960, Russia has launched 19 missions to the Red Planet and has had
precisely 19 partial or total failures. Five missions did achieve a portion of
their goals — putting a Martian satellite in orbit but failing to get a lander
to the surface, for example — but none have been unalloyed triumphs. The U.S.
has had its own Martian disasters in the past, but it's had a six-mission
winning streak going since 2001, with a seventh Mars ship on the way now.

The loss of Phobos-Grunt is equally big for space science as a whole.
A sample return mission has been in NASA's long-term plans for years, but budget
constraints have caused the agency to postpone the project repeatedly. Space
watchers in both the U.S. and Russia were rooting for this mission to succeed —
as was China, which had a small Martian orbiter riding along. All of that will
crash and burn — literally — within a few days. Traveling to Mars has always
been a very, very hard thing to do, and it will continue to be. You don't need
an imaginary U.S. plot to make that so.